Review : Fujitsu ScanSnap iX100

MacNN Rating:

Price: $229

The Good

Small and light

Faster than rivals

Handles a variety of sizes

Good 600dpi resolution

The Bad

No duplex scanning

No support for new Photos app (yet)

A bit pricey compared to rivals

Call me old-school, but I have been using a flatbed scanner for most of my scanning needs for the past decade or so. It's enormous, slow, and takes forever to "warm up" -- but it does the job, and it still works across many iterations of OS X. I keep it under my desk most of the time, and resent both the loss of floor space and how much trouble it is to set back up when I do need it. The wireless, battery-powered, portable Fujitsu iX100, then, was a surprise. Did it rise to the challenge and improve on the tried and true?

Of course I'd heard about portable scanners before, we've done dozens of articles on units like the DoxieGo, which is similar in nature to the Fujitsu iX100. In my mind, however, I never thought of these as "real" scanners, but more as a descendant of the nightmarishly-awful early handheld scanners that were difficult to use. I imagined that portable scanners like this were prone to jamming (given the different-sized items they'd be expected to scan), lower-quality, and just as difficult to set up and use regularly as "conventional" flatbed scanners.

This was entirely due to not having actually tried one, along with some bad experiences trying to get wireless office peripherals to work properly on various home Wi-Fi setups, particularly some of the "all-in-one" units that offered scanning as well as printing. While getting the printer component to work was usually not too much trouble (and in some cases falling-off-a-log easy), there was usually quite a bit more effort involved in getting the scanner to play nicely, particularly if you wanted to scan things wirelessly. On a number of models, the manufacturer said simply that wireless scanning was flatly not available for the Mac with that unit.

Thus, when I was handed the small, light box the iX100 comes in, I was trepidatious mostly about how difficult it would be to set up. Where was the elaborate, perfect-bound manual with detailed instructions? All I found was a brief guide and a visual chart of what to do (which beats a thick manual, but can still be confusing for people like me, who are not familiar with modern scanners). After a brief bit of confusion, however, and a quick download of the latest driver (and Fujitsu assisting software), the scanner (which was already half-charged, nice touch) paired up to the network with no fuss, which was the first of a series of nice surprises.

Once I found the Wi-Fi switch on the back, setup was a breeze

At this point, I was seriously rethinking my attitude towards scanners. Here was this oblong black plastic item, not quite the 11 inches long, not quite an inch and a half tall, entirely wireless and battery powered. Open two flaps, and it can scan an entire 8.5x11 sheet of paper, or two business cards/receipts (at the same time, if desired), or most other types of common paper printouts we find ourselves with these days. The feeding-in process worked and detected the type of document every time, the quality was very good (600dpi native for documents, 300dpi for photos), the unit was fast (even with color photos), and it could be placed anywhere we wanted. We could get very used to this, we thought, with our modest scanning requirements. We later compared it to online reviews of similar scanners, and found that the iX100 was universally rated as faster and in most cases better than its competitors.

As with most other scanners, you will probably need to use the provided, company-branded scanning software for the Mac. Fujitsu's software works fine -- but as with its competitors, offers only an obvious Windows port job, which just never looks "right" compared to native software. We tested the four included desktop apps -- ScanSnap Manager, ScanSnap Organizer, CardMinder (for managing scanned business cards), and ScanSnap Receipts -- and it all worked as expected. By far, the Manager app (which handles the scanning), CardMinder. and Receipts were the most useful to us -- Organizer is also fine, but we think most Mac owners will prefer to use their own organizational system. Image Capture also worked with it, once the driver was installed.

Once it is setup on the network, it is turned on or off by simply flipping the trays open or closed, a much appreciated touch. In addition, because the wireless scanning actually works quite well, you are also free to scan directly to an iOS or Android device. I'll be honest -- having struggled with various apps that claim to print directly from smartphones, the ease of scanning a photo directly to my iPhone was simply delightful, as was document-direct-to-PDF creation. I tried a wide variety of document types, and had no trouble with even tri-fold brochures that were not unfolded prior to scanning. I don't think anything much thicker than that would work well, but I was very pleased with how versatile and easy it was to change up from photos, to receipts, to business cards, to documents without effort, and without jamming.

In addition to local storage, the iX100 takes advantage of being on the network to offer the option (set up through the desktop or smartphone software) to send scans off (through its software, not directly) to some of the popular online cloud services like Evernote, Dropbox, Google Docs, SugarSync, and (for PCs only, and in a limited fashion) SharePoint. The CardMinder and Receipts programs for the desktop offer the ability to "read" scanned business cards and receipts, and put this data in formats usable by CRMs, contact programs, spreadsheets, databases and such, which makes it useful for tax preparation, budget reviewing, customer contact storage, and other business uses.

This is not a scanner for heavy users -- items can only be fed in one at a time (two at a time if they are small), but the iX100's ability to quickly and portably file away business cards, receipts, and other paper documents went much farther than any of my old scanners in getting me towards a "paperless office." Scanning to things like Evernote will be a boon for record-keepers who need the data from those records available on demand. The unit doesn't do "duplex" scanning, but the software is easily able to take separate scans of the front and back and put them together -- it can even reconnect scans of a folded document that might otherwise be too wide, like an 11x17 newspaper page.

I originally thought photo scanning would be this device's weak point, but frankly it more than rivaled my Epson flatbed when it came to scanning old pictures, and I think that for typical use (as opposed to very high-resolution archival work), this little stick of a scanner will be ideal for users who want to scan images for websites, social sharing, and even current photo library needs. Scanning took about five seconds per photo at 300dpi, which I found perfectly acceptable for small-batch or one-off photo scanning. The key thing about the iX100 was that it made me want to scan more -- a new feeling compared to the scanners I'm used to.

The unit is so small and light (14 ounces/400g) and that it can easily be packed into a suitcase, so one could scan photos at a relative's home on a visit rather than risk sending valuable photos through the mail. Its designed to be wireless -- it uses a micro USB port for recharging the built-in battery (or direct to Mac/PC connection), and is designed to work on a Wi-Fi connection (which I was sure would be another trouble spot, but multiple networks later I can report I had no trouble, as long as the network wasn't 802.11ac-only). This means it can easily be repositioned to give it room to be used when in use, but stored away in tighter quarters when not needed.

At a retail price of $229 (also seen at $190 on Amazon), this is not an impulse purchase, and I admit that I had some concerns about the durability of the plastic tray hinges over the long haul (or in a household with curious children). That said, in a home office type setup where scanning is only an occasional requirement, I'm sold that the iX100 is a better solution than an all-in-one printer/scanner type device, since most AIOs I've used give meaning to the phrase "jack of all trades, master of none." I'd rather invest in a small laser printer and this portable scanner than a bulky AIO that takes up more room to allow for a flatbed scanner one might only occasionally use. I'd miss the ability to do batch scanning of a pile of documents, possibly, but the speed of the iX100 makes it unlikely that the loss of a document feeder is going to be an issue, at least for me.

Back side of the unit

If you haven't used a portable full-width scanner, or if you are in need of a scanner for medium-to-light use, this one is definitely worth taking a look at, and appears to be "best in class" for its size and portability. For conventional photos and documents, it rivals consumer flatbeds with none of the bulk and weight, and it handles a wide variety of small and letter-sized documents without issues, reasonably quickly. Setup and operation were easier than expected, and the results were exactly what you'd expect from conventional scanners. I was unhappy when I had to send the review unit back, and I've been missing it every time my Facebook friends post Throwback Thursday pictures. I can see that I'll have to get myself one in the near future, as my brief exposure to the iX100 has made me aware of a lot of things I am suddenly motivated to scan and preserve.

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